Worlds Apart
by secretmonkey
Summary: What if Alex never made it off the ship? And what if, instead of taking them across the galaxy, the Exodus took them across dimensions? It's been a year since the ship stole Alex away and left her stranded on a different Earth. How has she survived? What happens when she meets 'new' Maggie? And will her love and her sister ever find her?
1. For Now

Alex sips her Scotch and soda - her fourth of the night - as she watches Maggie from across the bar.

She's not the only one.

Everyone else… well… they watch her too. They stare and they look and they do the only thing they really can do: they _imagine_. And, if she's being honest - which would, admittedly, be something _new_ for her, at least in the last year - that's all Alex can do _too_. Imagine. Imagine what might _be,_ which is, barely, a step better than imagining what _was_.

She's learned, slowly and painfully and with a fight every fucking step of the way, that imagining _that_ , that even allowing herself a moment to remember what was… yeah… that's a road best not traveled.

Mostly because it's a road - a path, really - she _can't_ travel. It may have taken every single moment of every one of the last three hundred and sixty-five days (damn near to the _hour_ ) but Alex has finally come to terms with the one inescapable certainty of her life. She's not going anywhere.

She's not going _home_ and no, she's not thinking about _that_ and she's sure as hell not thinking about how home is - or _was_ \- so much less a _place_ and so much more a _person_ or how, oddly enough, that person wasn't her _sister_. It's not that she doesn't miss Kara cause she _does_ , Alex misses her more than she thought possible _and_ she misses J'onn and Winn and James and, God help her, she even misses Mon El, though it would take a minor miracle - or, you know, hours and hours and _hours_ of waterboarding - to get her to admit _that_.

"Sometimes," she told Eliza one night - when the scotch and sodas might have numbered a bit _more_ than _four_ \- "I think about them and I play this… guessing game in my head. Trying to figure out what their lives are like now."

Kara, she's decided, finally had enough. Enough of being the _second_ super, enough of Mon El and his accidental (and she so puts air quotes around _that_ ) sexism and not so accidental lies. It makes Alex a little - or a lot, definitely _a lot_ \- sad, but she thinks without _her_ around to fall back on and to turn to and, sometimes, to weigh her down, Kara might well have finally become truly… _super_.

She's sure that J'onn is still J'onn, so basically he's still worrying and being that odd amalgam of dad and friend that he's always been. It's an odd line to straddle - odder still when you add in their actual dad - but Alex still finds it comforting, even now, to know that no matter what, Kara at least has him.

"She's strong," Alex says and she knows that's true, knows it's so much truer than even Kara knows and that it has so very _little_ to do with yellow suns and powers and everything the rest of the world thinks is what makes her special. "But even the strongest of us still…"

Still need. Still want. Still has that ache for someone or something, that missing piece that makes you whole. Alex spent years thinking that, for her, that piece was her father. That solving his case, getting closure on his disappearance, saving him, somehow that would put it all right, would put _her_ right. She knows better now, she's known that _he_ wasn't that for her, right from the minute the stars blinked out of existence, right in front of her, from the second the _Exodus_ ripped everything she'd ever known or loved away.

She'd known it before then, but she'd never _admitted_ it, not to herself and certainly not _out loud_. But in that last moment, there was no hiding it then, and no _point_ to trying, not anymore. Alex had taken one last deep breath of home, and it had slipped out, her truth floating away as all the air left her in a rush, the force of hopping dimensions nearly crushing her.

"Maggie."

So, yeah, here she sits. And stares. And does her damndest not to think of what was or what might have been. And makes sure to always stay just one scotch and soda on this side of what _might be_ , because she knows this Maggie, she's not _her_ Maggie and no, three hundred and sixty-five days or three hundred and sixty-five _years_ won't change that.

She's spent so many nights like this, missing them - missing _her_ \- and Alex knows she always will, but tonight, she's decided, is the end of the _rest_. Tonight is the last night she's going to let herself give in to the urges, like that one she has to sink into her misery or the one where she drowns her sorrows or the one where she pretends she's _not_ stalking a woman she doesn't know at all, even if she can describe every curve of her face, every line, every slope, every _bit_ , in excruciatingly exact detail.

Sometimes, when she's a little too close to that line, Alex wonders if the parts of this Maggie that she _can't_ see look as much like the parts of _her_ Maggie as that face does. And those are the times when she slips out of the bar early and hightails it back across town and through the door of her apartment without saying a word to Eliza - or to _anyone_ else - hiding beneath the covers on her bed, pretending that she's not wishing she was somewhere else, with _someone_ else, and that sleeping alone hasn't kept her up most of the last three hundred plus nights. She's gotten good at that, at pretending.

She's had to.

Tonight, Alex swears, is the night that _stops_. Tonight is the night she walks out of her - _walks_ , not _runs_ \- with her head held high and never looks back. A year is her limit and yeah, maybe it took the whole _year_ for her to get it, for her to hit it, but now she has and so tonight is the end, the finish, the finale. Tonight, Alex Danvers stops hiding and regretting and mourning people who aren't _dead_ , but _gone_ and tonight is the night she starts doing what she's sure they're doing, what they've _been_ doing.

Tonight, she starts living again.

You know, right after she finishes this drink. Or, maybe, the next one. No sense in rushing, right?

She's got all the time in the world.

* * *

Step one, Alex knows, is simple.

Get lucky.

She thinks it in her head and almost without warning, the thought of Mon El - because, really, who _else_? - snickering under his breath sneaks unbidden into her mind. _Get lucky_ , he'd laugh, no doubt nudging Winn and grinning like a fifth grade fool, _she said get lucky_.

Yes, 'she' did, you dumbass Daxamite. And yes, she even meant it like _that_. Sort of.

She stares at Maggie behind the bar and OK, maybe she meant it like that a little _more_ than sort of.

However she meant it, what it is, is the truth and not _just_ the truth about finding someone you can be _that_ way with, but the truth about _everything_. When it all comes right down to it, when it's all laid out there, so much of everything - life and love and death and all those little things that somehow fill in all the in betweens - they all amount to little more than luck. Everything is the roll of the dice, the cut of the deck, the whims of fate. It's the right place at the right time, the right words, or even just the _less wrong_ ones. It's catching her gaze and then somehow, through some sleight of hand or some magic you never knew you had, _holding_ it, _keeping_ it, clutching onto it for dear life. And even _that_ , even all those things we call love?

Still just _luck_.

Sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just plain fucking _dumb_ , but all times just luck. It's stumbling into showing affection without weakness (or too much strength), it's bumbling around in the dark and finding the ways to push (but not too hard) (just _enough_.) It's knowing when to hold, and when to fold and it's all about playing the odds and making the smart bets but Alex has played enough poker in her life to know that even _that_ boils down to one simple truth.

Sometimes, you play it perfect. Sometimes, you make all the right calls and go all in on just the right hand and in the end? That damn luck… it just plays _you_.

You can do _all_ the right things. Like, say, for example, planning to shut a ship down from the inside, trusting that you _can_ and - if somehow you _can't_ \- knowing that _she's_ out there, with her super speed and her super strength and, most of all, her super _will_ to make sure that you _won't_ , and she'll _be right there_ with all the power in the world.

And, as luck would have it, it's just not _enough_.

"I don't regret it," she told Eliza one night. They were sitting together on the tiny balcony outside her apartment and, even in the dark, Alex saw the look on the older woman's face, that face she'd spent her entire life watching and learning and _knowing_ and Alex saw it as clear as day. Eliza believed her.

As if she needed another reminder that this woman was _not_ her mother.

Sometimes - times that come more and more often lately, and Alex fucking _hates_ that but doesn't do anything to change it - she wishes that this Eliza _was_ her Eliza or, maybe, more accurately, that she was _her_ Alex. It's in that look, that _belief_ , that instant acceptance of the lie as truth because, clearly, the Alex of this world wouldn't have regretted it for one second. Eliza's eyes say it all, that _she_ would have looked at it as all for the greater good and her sacrifice as nothing more than a part of the job, a loss she was more than willing to risk, on the chance that she could save them all. All those aliens taken against their will - something they've got in common, now - were worth _more_. The good of the many and the good of the one and all that _bullshit_ and Alex says she doesn't regret it because she _has_ to.

She couldn't take the look in Eliza's eyes if she said different.

In a way, it's almost laughable, how even on a different Earth, there's still another Danvers - another _fake_ and yes, she still thinks of _her_ , of this world's Alex, as the _imposter_ and yes, she knows that's about as absurd as you can possibly get - ahead of her in Eliza's eyes.

If it wasn't for bad luck, Alex isn't sure she'd have any at all.

Alex shakes her head cause no, she's not going to think about _that_ \- not _again_ , not _tonight_ \- so she sips her drink and watches Maggie. She's not stupid or desperate or delusional enough (usually) to even try and convince herself that the woman behind the bar is _her_ Maggie. No, Alex knows better than that, she always does.

Well… maybe not _always_. Usually. Typically. Most nights, as long as she stays on the right side of the drinks and, really, _most_ nights?

Is about the _most_ she can _hope_ for.

Most nights, anyway. And most?

So this night, like most of them, Alex watches _this_ Maggie work. It's not stalking, not really, or so she tells herself and, even if she's not exactly _right_ , well… she doesn't really care.

"I've been yanked across dimensions," she told Jeremiah. "Pulled out of my own world like a cork shot out of a bottle and I landed down here, alone, lost, without _anyone_." She tried - with very little success - to ignore the pained look on his face or the gasp from Eliza. "I think maybe I'm entitled to a little… _something_."

And, so long as that something never made it past a few drinks and a few (or more than a few) stares and a little bit of a wandering, daydreaming mind, well, what's the harm, right?

(No, she doesn't count nights alone in her bed staring at pictures of Maggie on her phone until the tears blur her vision to the point where she can't tell her _girlfriend_ from her _sister_ as _harm_.)

So she grasps onto her little 'something', her nights spent in the back of the bar, hidden in plain sight behind the throng of the crowd. _Mag's_ is almost always crowded, nearly always jammed almost past the point of breaking and Alex tells herself that's good, that's _great_. It's cover, she says. It's a shield, a way to blend in and disappear.

Not that Maggie would know her anyway.

But she tries not to think about that.

(Maybe someday it'll work.)

 _This_ is Alex's something, this is the thing that's kept her sane - a dubious distinction, at best - over the last three-sixty-five. Yes, she has Eliza and yes, she has Jeremiah and yes, they're a… comfort (of a sort) (a _weird_ fucking sort) but they're not Maggie. And even though she knows that the woman behind the bar, so smooth and practiced and perfectly _at home_ , isn't Maggie either, Alex also knows that _that_ is her _real_ something. It's all about the forgetting.

Forgetting, for just a few minutes every night that her Maggie is somewhere else, that she's, really, _right there_ , just a vibrational frequency away. Her something is an escape, focusing on _her_ \- Maggie, real or not, hers or not - instead of on what the harm is or could be, or on all those deeper thoughts, about the philosophy and science of it all, the sheer luck (there it is _again_ ) and the utter chance of it all.

It's mind boggling, to say the least. Mind _warping_ , to say the most. The simple math of every single domino that had to line up _just right,_ had to fall so _exactly_ , had to tip and topple and crash into one another in such an oddly beautiful and precise pattern to bring her _here_.

Another Earth, another city, another life.

And still, right to Maggie.

The scientist in her knows there's an explanation for all of that. An equation and a set of figures and numbers and formulas about trajectory and distance and Pythagorean something or other.

For those few minutes, for those few drinks? Alex lets the science fade and listens to the other part of her, the part that beats in her chest and thrums in her ears. The part that says fuck the formulas and the numbers and Pythagoras. It's not about _that_.

It's about _her_.

Sometimes, mostly on the nights she gets just a bit too close to the _wrong_ side of those drinks, Alex finds herself thinking of the questions she never dares ask when she's sober. Are they all out there, somewhere, looking for her? Are they hopping from Earth to Earth, from haystack to haystack, all in quest of the proverbial needle, of _her_? Is Maggie leading the charge, crashing through breaches the way she used to crash through doors after suspects? Never giving up, never taking a single no, always believing that they're just one more Earth away?

It wasn't this one, it'll be the next one and it doesn't matter if the next one is the next or the next next or the next next next. They _will_ find her.

For about a hundred of those three-sixty-five, Alex _knew_ that was true. And for the next hundred and fifty (give or take) she was _positive_ they were coming. And for the last hundred and ten, the last one fifteen?

All those nights, the simplest and clearest fact of them all has clattered around the inside of her head, rattling back and forth like the ice in her glass.

How can _they_ find her? She can't even find herself.

This, Alex knows, is home now. Not just 'for now' but maybe 'for ever'. And she still doesn't really know where this _is_. Oh, she understands the concept of it all - the multiverse of infinite Earths, all with messes and crises all their own - but it's just _that_. A _concept_. One that begs the question.

Which here is _here_.

She's gotten in the habit of talking about it with herself every morning. She stares herself in the eye, right after her ice cold shower and scalding cup of coffee - her daily one-two punch that reminds her that she's alive and this isn't, you know, _just_ her personal _hell_ \- and she asks herself.

"Today?"

Earth 74.

"Tomorrow?"

Earth 143.

"Next week?"

She's feeling ambitious. Earth 1756.

Eventually, Alex figures, she'll get bored with the numbers. Maybe she'll start lettering them. Earth Q and Earth Y and Earth Double-A.

You know, to keep it _fresh_.

She wonders, sometimes, what Maggie - _this_ Maggie - would say if she told her the truth. It'd be a hell of a pick up line, right?

"Hey, just so you know? Where I'm from? You. Me. It's a thing."

And _those_ sometimes? Those are the sometimes when Alex knows she's crossed to the wrong side of the drinks and she makes her way, slowly (and no, she's not stalling _at all_ ) to the bar and pays her tab and leaves a tip and every time - _those_ sometimes and all the _other_ sometimes, too - there's her card, her _business_ card from her _job_ cause she has one of those _here_ , tucked under the bottom most bill.

And every time - _every time_ \- she slips it back out before Maggie plucks the cash from the bar, just a moment _before_ it's a moment _too late_. Because here, all there is is a woman behind a bar who isn't quite who Alex wants her to be, but she's all Alex's got, even if she's absolutely sure that's not ever going to be even _close_ to good enough.

She takes another slow sip and wishes, not for the first time, that she'd ordered something a little bit stronger. But Alex knows. Stronger drink equals _dumber_ her and, no matter, how broken she is, no matter how close she sometimes (read: _all_ the times) feels to dead and gone? She's still not ready to finish the job.

And going to bed with Maggie? Oh, that would finish it in _spades_.

And thinking about thinking about _that_? Yeah. It's time to go.

Alex slips through the crowd, surprised - again, not for the first time - at how many faces she knows, how many friendly, almost conspiratorial smiles those faces send her way. This, she guesses, is the way it happens, the slow and subtle way a place you live morphs into… home.

Yeah. _Definitely_ time to go.

She drops the money on the bar, no card this time because, well, no _time_. Alex needs to not be here and, since she can't actually be really not _here_ , she'll settle for not _in_ here, not in the bar, in _Maggie's_ bar, Maggie's world, and she'll settle for it as quickly as she can, just dropping the money and finding her way through the crowd and out the side entrance and into the cool night air without looking back.

That is, she realizes later, her first mistake.

"Early night?"

It's that moment - that _precise_ moment - when Alex realizes she hasn't actually heard Maggie, not in months (twelve of them, if you're counting.) She hadn't realized it, hadn't once thought of the _other_ reason staying so far back from the bar worked for her. It wasn't just hiding _her_.

Maggie - not _her_ Maggie and _that's_ a distinction Alex knows she's _gotta_ keep making in her _head_ cause, Lord knows, her _heart_ stopped listening the very moment her _ears_ heard - leans against the wall just outside the door. There's a nearly gone cigarette flickering between two of her fingers and it's all Alex can do _not_ to say 'you don't smoke'. She's eyeing Alex in a very hungry, very no bullshit, very un-Maggie like way and that _should_ make this easier

It doesn't.

It _so_ doesn't.

"I… um… I…"

Smooth, Danvers. Like Mon-fucking-El smooth.

Maggie nods. "Got it," she says and there's a smirk playing at the corners of her lips and _that_ is _so_ very Maggie that it almost hurts. "I um quite a bit too. Usually only on weekends, but it's Friday, so close enough, right?"

She pushes off the wall, dropping the cigarette to the pavement and grinding it under her heel with something like extreme prejudice.

"Nasty things," she says. "I really need to quit," she offers. "But then, I've never been one to do what's good for me, you know?"

And if she punctuates those last few words by stepping a few steps closer - a few too many, if you ask Alex and there's a thought she _never_ imagined she'd have - well, Alex can be forgiven if she sort of forgets… well… pretty much _everything_.

Except the fact that she hasn't _just_ not _heard_ Maggie in months.

She hasn't _touched_ her either.

"You usually stay later on Fridays," Maggie says and Alex is brought crashing back to reality cause, wait…

"You know how long I stay?"

The 'you know who I am' and the 'you've been watching me?' and the 'I bet you say that to all the girls' (still smooth, really) are left unsaid but that's only _mostly_ due to Alex being so confused that she can't find the words.

There's also the three more steps toward her Maggie's taken and the three more steps away that Alex knows she _should_ have taken, with _should_ being the key fucking word.

"You've been coming here nearly a year," Maggie says. Her voice, it's a little less gravel and a lot more silk and that should sound wrong but, again, _should_ is the key. "Four nights a week, give or take, you always pay cash and you always take your card back before I can get it." There's one _more_ step, which is really one _less_ than Alex thinks she can take. "I may not be a detective, but I pay attention."

Alex shuts her eyes and realizes, almost immediately, that that is her _second_ mistake. Because now she can't see Maggie, but she can _feel_ Maggie, right there, in her space, aggressive and demanding and direct in ways her Maggie might not have been - at least not in _public_ \- but it's so raw and she's so _there_ and it's been so _long_ …

But not long _enough_ , it would seem, for there to not be one more domino to fall.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket - her _new_ phone, the one from this world - and Alex fishes it out, so very grateful for the distraction. Right up until she's not.

 _Mom: It's time. She's nearly gone._

It took Eliza six weeks to convince Alex to update her contacts, to make her 'mom' instead of 'Eliza', six weeks of 'what would people say if they saw' and 'if you're going to live this lie, then you need to _live_ it' but Alex finally caved and no, Maggie isn't reading over her shoulder, but she _could_.

Not that she'd understand.

"I have to go," Alex says, finding her voice again. Amazing what a little urgency can do, right? "It's a… family thing." She tucks the phone back into her pocket and turns to leave, but she stops cold when Maggie calls out.

Third mistake.

"Don't you ever wonder?" Maggie asks. "What might happen if you didn't take your card back?"

She could lie. She _should_ lie. But she and Maggie swore they'd never do _that_. And maybe this isn't her Maggie, but she's all Alex's got and right now, in this moment? That's _enough_.

Does she ever wonder? Alex nods as she walks away. "Every single time," she says.

The 'and that's why I don't do it' is left, like so very much else, unsaid.

At least for now.


	2. Waiting

Maggie should be hurrying.

She's late. Again. Yes, that _is_ sort of her style, that _is_ sort of her thing, if by 'thing' you mean 'thing that gets her called into the director's office at least once a month, twice or more if it's a month when M'gann can't visit and J'onn is a little… testy.' But still, style or not, thing or not, Maggie knows she _shouldn't_ be late again.

So, you know, she walks just a little slower.

It isn't like it's _always_ her fault (it is) or that she does it intentionally every time (just most) but in the eight months she's been here, Maggie has learned two very important lessons. One, is that almost nothing inside the DEO is under her control.

Like, you know, the _search_ , just for an example.

They checked four this week. Four Earths - which strikes Maggie as something that _should_ be the oddest thing she's ever thought, but she knows probably won't even be the oddest thing she thinks _today_ \- which is at least five or six or, you know, _all of them,_ fewer than they would have if she were in charge. In fairness, it was _supposed_ to be eight, J'onn had E171 through E179 on the schedule, and - if Maggie had pushed (and when _didn't_ she) - E180 and even E181 might have been on the table.

But, there was an outbreak. And, really, isn't there _always_?

Maggie's come to the slow realization that life in the DEO is a never ending series of break outs or break _ins_ or something - or some _one_ \- just breaking, all the time, almost constantly, and no, she doesn't think it's some big conspiracy or a plot or fate just out to fuck with her.

OK. She doesn't _always_ think that. Like, hardly ever. Like, only once in a while. Only on days that end in… you know… _y_.

She slows even more as she passes the hub, not wanting J'onn to see her and usher her along or, even worse, call her in for another in his overly long line of 'protocol is how we'll get her back' speeches that she knows full fucking well he doesn't even believe. Just like she doesn't really _believe_ the universe is out to get her. It's just easier to _think_ it is, to pin it on something like fate or Cadmus or bureaucratic bullshit that says they have to do things _other_ than search for Alex twenty-four-seven.

Things like outbreaks of Draghixian flu (and _see_ , it _wasn't_ the oddest thing she thought today.) It occurs to Maggie - as she pauses by Winn's station, glancing down at the half assembled guts of… well… some techno _thing_ she doesn't understand but _assumes_ is half assembled - how easily things like that, words that don't even sound _human_ , let alone _English_ , now roll off her tongue. She wonders, sometimes, when things like deadly alien flu epidemics turned into just another 'one of those things' that she thinks of or mentions so casually, like talking about what she had for dinner last night.

Pot stickers, for the record. Again. Kara was over. Again. She left, abruptly, when Lena dropped by.

Again.

Maggie picks her up her pace - just a step or two - because yeah, even another visit with Doctor Rory is better than thinking about… _that_. She'll take an hour in the box, not giving Rory a thing she can work with, or four or five hours quarantining half of Old Towne infected with deadly alien spider flu, over five minutes in her own head, any day. Especially when those five minutes are all about the memory of judgy Kryptonian eyes burning a hole into her (not _literally_ ) (though they _could_ ) as she shut her apartment door, with the Luthor on the wrong side of it.

She rounds the last corner, taking special pains not to look to her right, not to look down the hall towards the armory - no need to relive _that_ particular nugget today, right? - and pauses outside Dr. Rory's door. She's already late so another minute doesn't matter. So maybe they'll have to rush a little, maybe they won't be able to spend quite as much time talking about nothing as they did last time. There's always the next time. And the time after that and the time after _that_.

Maggie raises a hand to knock, but she can't quite bring herself to do it. Her hands fall to her sides and she tugs at the fabric of her uniform, pulling at it, prying it from her skin, fighting the way it feels like it's suffocating her. _This_ is the part she hates, the part that _kills_ her. This is the part that is that _other_ lesson she's learned.

This is the moment _before_ and, really, Maggie feels like everything about her life has come to rest on a never ending series of 'befores', of those moments spent waiting for what might happen. But what, inevitably, never does.

Waiting for every mission schedule to be posted, only to see them postponed or scrapped. Waiting for every week's random bit of nothing close to luck - alien flu, visiting ambassadors, Mon El going mad, people dying - to pass so they can get back to… well… back to the business of hurry up and wait. Waiting for the other shoe, waiting for the hammer to fall, waiting on _this_ side of every breach to see what - _who_ \- is on the other side.

And then, without fail, waiting on _that_ side to come back home.

Alone.

Maggie is officially three minutes and thirty-seven seconds late when she finally knocks. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what she does or when she does it. It doesn't matter what she fucks up today or fixes tomorrow. That's the lesson Maggie's learned in all these moments. That the days?

They're just like the breaches. Just like the other Earths.

Behind every one, is _another one_.

Just waiting.

* * *

It's the silence. That's what gets her, every damn time.

There was a time, like a year and five months ago (give or take) when Maggie didn't mind it. When a night at home with a bottle of wine and a stack of crime scene reports wouldn't have been totally out of her norm. She had a life, she had dates, she had friends. But then, sometimes, when she _chose_ it, she had the quiet too.

But _then_ , she didn't have Alex.

So, you know, kind of like _now_.

It's quiet - _too_ quiet, too quiet by half - in the office and there's only so many times Maggie can clear her throat or sip her water or glance at the clock on the wall off to her side (just far enough that she has to turn her head and her hair swishes against the back of the chair and _this_ is what she's been reduced to, relishing the sound of her own _hair_ ) before it's gonna seem… weird.

Yeah. Cause _that's_ what's weird. She's in a uniform so tight it's like something out of an Avengers fanboy's wettest dream, she spent four hours this morning on an alternate Earth - accompanied by her own personal _swat team_ \- she's got a lunch meeting with an incognito Martian, and she's pretty sure (not that anyone will _confirm_ ) that her DEO appointed shrink is not of this world.

And yes, she means that _literally_.

She suspects Infernian, but that's just a guess, though it's all in the eyes. Those eyes that are totally, absolutely _unnaturally_ blue, like fall off the cliffs and drown in the oceans of them _blue_ \- like they just _have to be_ contacts blue - as if maybe she's hiding something (like, you know, _fire_ ) behind some sort of state of the art Winn-tech. So, it's the eyes and the fact that the director has specified that Doctor Rory's office temperature be twenty degrees lower than everywhere else in the building.

The devil, Maggie knows, is in the details. You can take the girl out of the detective - she's _Agent_ Sawyer now - but you can't take the detective out of the girl.

Lately, the last two or three appointments or so - three times a week, four on weeks she can't go on away missions, _five_ on weeks where those missions turn up breachers, but not the one she's looking for, _never_ that one - Maggie's taken to gently jiggling her left knee up and down in her chair. Just a little, mind you, not nearly enough that the good doctor notices (she does) or asks about it (she doesn't) (she doesn't ask _anything_ ) but just enough that the fabric of her uniform, whatever the hell it is, rubs against the leather of the chair.

It's like the hair, but not quite as loud in her own ears. And not _quite_ as sad.

Maggie tries not to think of how many things in her life that description - not quite as sad - has come to fit in the last year.

So it's a jiggle and a swish and - on her really desperate days - a loud _swallow_. Nothing all that big, nothing too grand, all of it so much closer to a whimper than a bang, but they're all something. And Maggie needs something, she needs _anything_.

Before the silence drives her mad.

Though, at least if it does - she figures - she's in the right place.

"It was my fingers," she says, not in the least surprised when Dr. Rory doesn't so much as glance up from her tablet. This is how they always start - and frequently _finish_ \- with Maggie reaching her limit, when the silence and the waiting (so much _waiting_ ) pushing her to, and _past_ , the point of blurting out whatever's on her mind. "When we first started, I used to tap my fingers on the arm of the chair. You remember?"

If Dr. Rory _does_ , Dr. Rory _doesn't_ say, but Maggie does, she remembers. It's been eight months and a hundred and some odd appointments and she still remembers every last detail of every single one of them. She remembers the Doc not even noticing, barely registering the tap-tap-tap, like _at all_ , not until the once steady rhythmic pattern turned staccato, a rocking drum solo on the brown leather, but even _then_ , Rory didn't _say_ anything.

She just stared.

Maggie reminds her, "I knew that trick. I _used_ that trick." She did and she had, back in the good old days when she was _just_ a cop - you know, as opposed to some Battlestar Galactica wannabe _secret agent_ \- all the times when she'd had a perp locked in the box. "Sometimes, they were human," she says, "sometimes… I don't…" she shrugs. "Back then I was never sure, you know? I _thought_ , but I didn't _know_ and then when I did…"

When she did, everything changed and it changed _fast_. Maggie's life spun on a dime, but she never once _minded_. She never once worried about it, she never wished for it to be different. There was no secret hope to somehow un-know all the things she'd learned, to unsee all the secrets that had been revealed one after another. _That_ had never been Maggie's way, not in _anything_. Things happened, things changed, that was how it worked. All you could do was take the hand you were dealt, _own_ it, and move on, move ahead. Her aunt taught her that, years ago, the _first_ time that dime spun.

"You are who you are," she told her, a comforting hand resting on Maggie's back as the fourteen year old silently sobbed. It wasn't the first, or the last, night she said those words. "And life is what it is, and if you spend all of your time trying to change one or the other, you'll end up with _neither_." For three years, her aunt reminded her over and over again. "You can't wait, Maggie, you can't stand still, you _move_. Always on, always ahead. And those that can keep up, they will. And those that just can't, or won't…"

They couldn't or wouldn't and, she said, in the end, they wouldn't matter because there was always someone who _could_ and _would_. And there would always be walls and there would always be doors, but you charged through them, and if you had to, you _kicked them in_ and when the dust cleared, you left the debris in your wake and you kept moving on, never, _ever_ looking back.

It's funny, to Maggie, to think of that _now_ , when everyday's just _another_ door to kick down and she's broken so many that she's knee deep in debris and the only thing that keeps her sane?

Looking back.

And yeah, she knows even that's not working too well anymore. She's aware.

She's here, isn't she?

"I used to stare at them, like _that_ ," she says. "The perps. The ones I _knew_ were guilty." It was a simple equation really. Stare and wait. Wait and stare. "A good glare, plus time, was really all it ever took," she says. Eventually, they cracked. Eventually, they gave it up - whatever 'it' was - they all told her what she needed to know. Eventually, they all _broke_.

The first few times Dr. Rory tried it, Maggie just laughed. This woman clearly had no idea just who she was dealing with. Maggie Sawyer - agent _or_ detective - didn't break. But, eventually, Maggie figured it out. She wasn't _going to_ break. And Rory never really expected her to.

After all, you can't break what's already broken.

And still, Maggie finds herself looking back. "It worked on them, but it never worked on _her_ ," she says, utterly and irrevocably conscious of the fact that, in here, it's _always_ 'her' and it's never her name, as if she's a curse or a spell. "I'd still try it, like when I knew she had a surprise planned or she was trying to ignore me to watch one of those shows she and her sister loved." Maggie does her best (not nearly good enough) to ignore the past tense in everything she says. "But she'd just roll her eyes at me or poke me in my side and tell me to 'quit it', like I was a little girl tickling her on the school bus."

Rory notes it all - she's fucking _obsessive_ about it - and Maggie watches the stylus at work. A thin silver tube, a rubber tip on one end, swirling and swishing back and forth across the screen. No old school bullshit for her, no pencil scratch on legal pad, no pen cap clicking against her nails. Rory is all modern, all the time, technology at work.

You know… _silent_ technology.

"She was noisy," Maggie says and there it is - again - the blurt, the moment when her brain says to hell with logic and conversational flow and staying on topic, which Maggie recognizes is, sort of, a little bit ironic, since _she_ is always the topic. "It wasn't that she talked a lot, though I guess maybe she kinda _did_. But that was just her being chatty, you know? That was her way, was her being her, probably from a lifetime of growing up with Kara and oh my _God_ , if you ever got the two of them started…"

If you did, Maggie remembers, you might not get silence for _weeks_.

She tenses just a bit, which is _far_ better than it was, back at the beginning. Back then, she lived in fear of even saying Kara's name, much less of mentioning her and… _her_ … in the same breath. To her - the agent _and_ the detective - it was just a matter of time, before someone figured it out and it was just sheer dumb fucking _luck_ that no one had already.

"I told you," she used to tell them _both_. "The glasses don't help and neither do all those unfortunate pony tails, but at least it's better than your cousin and that one stupid forehead lock and yes, I know he doesn't do that anymore, but it's like parachute pants or fanny packs. That shit lives _forever_."

Maggie was sure it was going to happen, eventually, and she was even _more_ sure it was going to be her that fucked it up, that gave up the super powered ghost. This is the part of the job she hates, the part of who… _she_ … was that Maggie's never been able to get a handle on. The secrets and the lies and the cover stories - not a one of them ever any good, the sort of shit a third grader could see right through even _without_ x-ray vision - all, she knows, part and parcel of the DEO package. Maggie gets _that_. She understands the need for it, especially for Kara.

But she understands how planes fly and why you have to boil water to make pasta and why her aunt was the only one who accepted her after she came out.

Understanding doesn't always mean… _understanding_.

This is the part Maggie's no good at. She doesn't lie well, she never has. If Alex, the _person_ , was half as good at reading people as Alex, the _agent_ , she'd have seen through Maggie's 'just friends' bullshit like _immediately._

Though maybe not _that_ fast. Maggie knew - even without Dr. Rory's help - that part of, or even _most_ of, the reason Alex didn't see through it wasn't just because she _couldn't_. She didn't _want_ to, cause Alex expected to be unhappy, she'd come to live with it, to feel like it was her default so it was easy for her to believe Maggie's lies.

No matter how shitty they were.

And just then, just when Maggie's on the verge of looking back so hard that she slips away, washed aside by a river of moments she's terrified will be the only ones they ever have...

"Do you spend much time together? You and Kara? Now that Agent Danvers is gone?"

There's a moment - which comes right _after_ the moment when she tries to remember the last time Rory _spoke_ \- when Maggie swears she's got nothing short of a thousand thoughts, and maybe a thousand and one _emotions_ , all Barry Allen-ing their way through her mind all at once. There's a bit of shock, at the question. Not just the _what_ of it, but that she asked it _at all_. Dr. Rory hasn't once asked a thing, not since the first week. Not since the first _minute_.

 _Do you know why you're here?_

Of course she knew. To keep her job. So the director and _his_ directors could make sure she was still five-by-five. So just in case she went round the bend - or _further_ round it since, clearly, she'd gone _way_ round it the moment she took this job - and blew up a parallel world, they'd have all the plausible deniability they could ever want.

We thought she was stable. She seemed to be handling it so well. The doctor spoke to her every week and there was nothing… amiss.

Amiss. Nothing _amiss_. It's a funny word, Maggie thinks, even funnier when you think about it, when you consider there hasn't been much that _isn't_ amiss in the last fucking year. Alex isn't here, James is dead, Mon El is… well… he's _Mon El_ , but he's locked away - usually - and Kara is, quite possibly, slowly going further round that same bend and she's got superspeed.

She might just lap Maggie.

And that's not even getting into Lena and Winn and J'onn and M'gann and you want to talk _amiss_?

So… where was she? Right. The question. The one she's shocked is being asked at all, but she's even more stunned by the prescience of it, the way it hooks right into _exactly_ what she was thinking and, so, no, maybe the good doc _isn't_ Infernian. No telepathy there.

A Titanian, maybe? Maggie would suspect a Kalvar but Doctor Rory isn't, you know, a _bird_.

And yes, she's stalling. She being Maggie and the stalling being one of those tricks she learned from Alex, the way to keep your thoughts dancing around everything _but_ the one thing you're really _desperate_ to think about.

Like that word. Not 'amiss'. The _other_ one.

 _Gone_.

In the end, _that's_ what she focuses on because, really, it's the only part that _matters_. "Gone. You said 'gone'," Maggie says, the word tastes bitter on her tongue, not unlike she imagines poison might, as it slowly trickles its death down your throat. "Al… _she_ isn't _gone_."

Doctor Rory says nothing. Her stylus swipes across the screen. Silently, of course.

"I know what 'gone' means." Maggie's knee jiggles against the chair and this time it's got _nothing_ to do with not being able to stand the silence and _everything_ to do with not being able to stand the fact that she can't punch the _good_ doctor right in the face for even _suggesting_ that. "James is _gone_ ," she says, noting the way Dr. Rory's stylus pauses, for a heartbeat, before it's silently picking up the pace once more. "Jeremiah is _gone_ ," she says and she tries - unsuccessfully - to feel even just a little bit bad about that,. "Last week, on E57, one of my team didn't pay attention. Lept out of a breach and right off a cliff. _She's_ gone."

Maggie would've thought those screams would haunt her forever, but no, they don't. They haven't kept her up, not even one single night.

She thinks better of mentioning _that_ to Rory.

This is the moment where Maggie might expect the good doctor to chime in and apologize - to say 'oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean _gone_ , I just meant not here' - to clarify and specify and be precise cause that's what doctors do, right? They're not into semantics, they're not big on word games, they're not all about saying the one thing they know might push someone into a reaction.

That's not a doctor move, that's more of a…

 _Cop_ move.

Maggie leans back into the chair, letting the leather swamp her and pull her under, almost cradling her and she wonders - not for the first time - if these chairs were Rory's choice, all part of a plan to create the only comfortable spot in all the DEO, an oasis of soothe, a little bit of tender loving care right in the midst of the most _uncaring_ spot in the building. A way to lull someone to sleep, even while they're still awake, to slip past their defenses and under their radar, giving them a sense of comfort, of safety.

Of home.

Except, in Maggie's case, home is… well… home is on E-somethingorother, some world she hasn't yet found, some breach she hasn't yet stormed through.

Some door she hasn't kicked in.

"I know what you're trying to do," Maggie says and she _does_ , it's as clear as day, as clear as the sky over E44 or as clear as the waters on E49. "I know it's your job. You've gotta make sure, you need to be 100% on me." It's a simple equation. All the best of them are. "This _isn't_ my world," she says.

Someday, Maggie thinks, maybe she won't have to think of _everything_ in terms of worlds. Ones she belongs to. And ones she can't seem to find.

"This was _her_ world," she says, noting that even the stylus has gone still. "This was where she… where _Alex_ belonged. She was DEO, top to bottom. She believed in what y'all do and, momentary lapses aside, she was a good soldier." Maggie shakes her head and laughs, maybe the most honest one she's had in nearly a year. "That's _never_ been me. And I'm OK with it."

But it isn't just about her anymore, is it?

She leans forward in the chair, hands on her knees, still as stone, now, her voice calm. "But you have to be sure, don't you?" she asks, not really expecting - or getting - an answer. "You've gotta know that when it hits the fan out there, I'll _be_ the good soldier, that I won't make the wrong choice."

You know, like trying to save a ship full of aliens by _yourself_.

"I can respect that," Maggie says and she means it. She _gets_ it. Back in the day - you know, a year ago - she wouldn't have wanted to be on the street with a loose cannon, with someone she couldn't trust. The titles might be different, the _jobs_ might be different, but it's all so very much the _same_. "But here's the thing," she says, " _this_ is what _you_ have to understand."

She slips from the chair and finds her feet. If she's going to make a stand, well, she's gonna _stand_.

"You can push all you want," she says. "You can try all your tricks and push all my buttons and steer me into whatever reactions you want." She's been so on edge and so _right there_ , so on the surface for the last 365, Maggie's surprised every day she hasn't already snapped. "And you can mark down on your little form, put down in your report that I'm unfit for duty, if that's what you think."

Doctor Rory doesn't flinch or look or _breathe_ and _damn_ would Maggie never want to play poker with her.

"It doesn't matter," Maggie says and she means that _too_. "Because I won't stop. I _can't_. I will find a way, I will _make_ a way, if I have to, but I will _not_ stop looking until I find her."

The intercom beeps on Rory's desk and she doesn't look away - not even for a second - as she reaches over and toggles it. "Yes?"

It's Vasquez, calling from ops. They need Maggie there _now_. There's been an… incident… off world.

"She'll be right there," Rory replies, cutting the connection. Maggie turns to go, but the doctor calls out, freezing her in the door. "You should know, Agent Sawyer, that I've been marking you down as unfit for duty since the first time we met." Clearly, that opinion's been noted, but ignored, and neither of them has to wonder by _who_. "Before I was DEO, I was army and before that I was… something else. I've lived this life for almost _all_ of mine," she says. "And you're right, Agent, this is _not_ your world."

Maggie shakes her head, tugging the door open, no intent of ever coming back. "No," she says, "it's not. But it's the world I'll live in, just as long as it takes. Because my world?" She doesn't look back as she leaves. "My world is out there. I just have to find her."


	3. Choices

If she's being honest - and she _should_ be, since it's just her here - Alex never thought it would last.

Yeah, there was that whole 'the universe just doesn't want me to be happy' bit, but she'd said, _promised,_ that she was over that, or _trying_ to be at least, and there _was_ a time, an all too brief moment - it was like a month, but it seemed, to her, like _days_ , not weeks - when she'd actually thought that maybe the universe might have changed its mind. Maybe, she mused ( _hoped_ ) it had reconsidered, maybe it had taken a second look at everything, seen all the good she had done, all the people she'd helped.

Maybe, she _let_ herself think, the universe or fate or _whatever_ , had taken her measure, had gone ahead and judged her (as she always suspected it did) and, to its (and her) great surprise, she'd _not_ come up lacking. Alex dared to hope, for just a moment - for _all_ of those moments spent with Maggie - and yeah, _now_ she gets it, now she realizes _that_ was her first mistake.

She hoped.

It wasn't like she broadcast it to the world, though. She didn't scream it from the top of a tower, didn't have Kara skywrite it between the stars. For those few moments - far far _far_ too few, she realizes now - she _was_ something different, a… 'new' Alex, who, really, wasn't all that different from the old one. It was subtle, a small dash of hope rather than hopes _dashed_ , a very Maggie shaped drop more of joy, the tiniest splash of belief that things might actually work out.

It wasn't far off the original recipe, but it was… _enough_. But it was all on the _inside_ , something just for her, a warmth that swelled in her chest at night, blossoming and blooming and filling her in ways she'd never even imagined.

As she walks toward the train, tugging her coat tighter against the sudden and bitter cold of this place, an Earth she doesn't know the number or the name of, it's _that_ warmth Alex finds herself missing most of all.

She's relieved now, in that painful pill of a way that relief sometimes comes, that she never let it show. That to the world - to _her_ world - she was always the 'old' Alex. "Someday," she joked to Maggie, always couching it in humor, a little bit of self-deprecation that her laugh and smile said that she didn't actually _believe_. "Someday, it'll happen," she said. "You're gonna get sick of me, so tired of us, so _over_ it all, you'll wish me off to another planet or something."

Yeah. Or _something_.

Irony. It's just so… cold. That's what it is. Cold, like the wind here, the sharp stab of it whipping through her, almost like she's not _really_ there. Back when she used to think of rescue, when her days all started with the same thought - today's _the_ day - Alex thought that cold would probably be the first thing she'd tell them all about.

"It was all I felt," she'd say. "When I woke up and it was all so dark and I thought… well, it must have been the end, you know? It _seemed_ like it, but that cold," she'd tell them. It nipped at her, stung her skin through the tears in her uniform, like it was an actual _thing_ , solid and _living_ and, it seemed to Alex, refusing to let _her_ be anything _but_. "It got me moving," she'd tell them. "I _had_ to warm up," she'd laugh, hoping it _sounded_ less forced than it _felt_. "It just hurt too much to be dead."

That cold was her one companion for those first few hours that, for all she knew then _or_ now, might have been _days_. The first week or so after she… arrived… has always been a bit of a blur to her. She remembers it in fragments, shattered shards of moments of calling out in the dark for Kara, for J'onn, for her father. Walking the same ground (she _thinks_ ) over and over, hunting for wreckage, for survivors.

For victims.

She was the only one of either and she still doesn't know what happened to the others, to the ship. She just knows she wandered through that dark alone and she's _still_ alone, even when she's _not_. Whether she's with Eliza or Jeremiah or the girls from work - how fucking _weird_ is _that_? - it's all still so… empty. Like they're just there filling a spot, saving a seat, placeholders for the _real_ and yes, Alex is aware that they _are_ real and that, if anyone, _she's_ the fake.

She's reminded of that every morning when she wakes in a bed that _feels_ like hers, almost, in a room that _looks_ like hers, almost, and the first thing she sees, without fail, is a face that looks like hers.

Almost.

 _She_ would look more like _her_ , Alex knows, if she wasn't sick. If she wasn't withered and gaunt and so frail that Alex's afraid to look too long, lest she break her.

They'd be _twins_ , if _she_ wasn't, you know, _dying_.

Sometimes, like most of those mornings and damn near every night - save those nights in the bar and _only_ when she's _in_ the bar - Alex feels like she's still in that dark place, wandering and alone. She's never been sure how she'd tell them all about _that_ , about nights that might have been hours or minutes that maybe were days. "It seemed endless," she'd probably say, and it wouldn't be a lie, but it wouldn't be a whole truth either.

It _was_ dark and it did _seem_ endless.

But it felt…

It felt just a bit like home. You know, _almost_. And no, Alex didn't know _then_ and doesn't know _now_ just what the hell to do with _that_.

"It was dark," she'd say. "And then after… time… it cleared a bit and then it was... woods and then… a field… like a yard."

Like, it turned out, a playground. A rusted swing set and a slide with a ladder that didn't reach the ground and those little ride ons, the hard plastic ones, shaped like farm animals and dinos and they'd had those, outside their school, when they were kids.

"You always had to ride the T-Rex, remember?" she'd ask and Kara would laugh and nod and Alex tries not to think about how much more distant a memory that sound becomes every day she's here. She knows Maggie would've held her hand and shoved away all the doctors and techs checking her over for like the one hundredth time and she would've rested her head on her love's shoulder and all would've seemed right with the world.

 _Their_ world.

She hates, maybe more than anything, how little that world feels like _hers_ anymore.

For all those days, when the thoughts of rescue came every morning before she opened her eyes and floated past them as they drifted shut every night, those thoughts always made Alex smile, thinking of the T-Rexes and school and playgrounds and all the things that were, but would never be _again_.

Those were her favorite moments of every day and every night _and_ the ones she dreaded more than any other. In the end, is it any wonder that she _had_ to give it up, that she _had_ to just _stop_ hoping?

Not that she _has_ , not really, not that hope is really 'hop _ed_ ', _yet_. But tonight was going to be the night for that, remember? Tonight was the night she was going to bring an end to the end, stop living out the end of one life over and over and _over_ again and get started on… well…

On _something_. What that something is, Alex has no idea. Which, if she's being honest - and that, apparently, is a something she's got some trouble with - is total _bullshit._

 _If you're going to live this lie, you need to_ live _it._

When she'd promised herself, when she swore halfway through drink number four, when she _vowed_ that tonight was going to be the end - the end of all the mourning and all the wallowing and all the missing… home - Alex _meant_ it. She was _ready_ , she was _set_ , she was good to _go_.

She couldn't be her world's Alex anymore because, after all, her world was gone. Sometimes, she wishes she could talk to Kara just one more (last) time, just to tell her that now, she _gets_ it, now she understands. Being the survivor?

It sucks. It sucks out fucking loud.

Alex knows it's different - Kara did have Clark, after all, and her Earth isn't really _gone_ , not like Krypton, but oh, that's just so much _semantics_ \- so, yeah, maybe she's not the last daughter of Earth. But here? Soon? As soon as the disease (measles) (fucking _measles)_ runs its course?

She'll be the _only_ daughter. The last of the Danvers. If she chooses. If she lets the lie become truth. And why _wouldn't_ she? She's not going home, there's no making it back and Alex is tired, so very tired of being trapped in all that dark that turned to woods that turned to play, and tired of falling victim over and over again to that quicksand combo of fear and loss and… hope.

Oh, how she's come to _hate_ hope.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she glances at the screen as she walks, almost stumbling as she steps blindly off a curb, the phone slipping from her fingers, clattering to the ground with the last message still blinking on the screen.

 _Mom: You should hurry. She's asking for you._

Hope, she knows _now_ , just _kills_.

As she shoves the phone back in her pocket and pulls her coat tighter against the cold, hurrying for the train, Alex thinks about the universe, the one that never wanted her to be happy and how close she is to… beating it. How simple it would be for her, if she _could_ put an end to the end, if she could just take this life, the one being handed to her, as if it was always meant to be.

No aliens. No heroes and no villains, no powers, no wondering if today will be the day the world ends because you can't find a way to make it _not_ be. No more moments of life _and_ death.

Just moments of life. And maybe, just _maybe_ , moments of happy. Maybe not the ones she thought she'd have - the ones she _hoped_ and _dreamed_ and _planned_ with Maggie - but they could still be moments of happiness. Or, you know, _almost_ happiness.

And sometimes, Alex really thinks almost might be almost _enough_.

Sometimes, so many _more_ times that she ever would have believed, Alex can feel all of that, right there, and it's all she can do not to reach out and grab ahold of it, to take it in hand and never let go. It would be a trade, there'd be a price, a bit of give to get. Get a life - _this_ life - and, in exchange?

No Kara. But not _just_ no Kara. No J'onn, no DEO. No Winn and no James and no (God, help her) Mon El.

No Maggie.

It's a high price, to be sure. Painfully high. But sometimes - _too_ _many_ times - Alex isn't so sure that it's _too_ high. Not when she's alone at night in that bed that feels just a little too _almost,_ in a room that's not _quite_ right, all belonging to someone else, someone who has her name and her face but isn't _her_.

But she could be.

Those nights, Alex thinks about that universe, the one she was so sure never wanted her to be happy, about how it dropped her here - of all the Earths in all the verse - with an Alex Danvers who's slipping away _._ Her body hangs on, but her mind is already so lost, one tiny bit at a time washing away like so much sand on the shore. All her memories, dreams, and thoughts, all of what makes _her_ Alex is fading, turning to shadows in another endless dark.

When Alex made that promise to herself, she knew exactly what she was doing, what she was _choosing._ She was putting an end to the end of one Alex Danvers, to the end of a life that had been over far longer than she wanted to admit, prolonging a life that wasn't _supposed_ to be. It was a death, of sorts. She was the one who'd live, that was the bargain, that was the deal.

She thought she could live with it, she thought she could see the light at the end of the tunnel of a lost and miserable year. For a moment - just _one_ \- that flicker of hope warmed her again.

But now?

She's just so cold.

* * *

She's about five minutes from the train when her phone buzzes again and Alex ignores it. Head in the sand, out of sight, out of mind, it's not true if she doesn't _know_.

There's a part of her that wants to laugh, to marvel at how _accurate_ that all is, how the story of her life it is. From Kara and her secret powers to _her_ and her secret job (life) and let's not even _start_ about the _other_ parts, the ones she kept a secret from herself for so long, and she _means_ that, really, because if she starts with those…

If she starts with those, she's going to turn right back around with a 'fuck the train' and a 'fuck that lie' and a 'fuck my better judgement' and end up right back at not-Maggie's door and she might not ever leave again.

And that? Well… tonight might be the night for Alex Danvers to die, but Alex isn't quite ready to be the one doing the _killing,_ so no, she's not going to turn back and she's not going to run to the woman who isn't hers.

Not yet, anyway.

Give her time. If there's one thing the last year has taught her? Time plus this world minus one more bit of her soul _always_ equals her doing something she swore she never would.

Alex can see the train in the distance and, not for the first time, she wishes for the simple joy of slipping behind the wheel, of the thrum of an engine as _she_ steers and yes, she gets that _that_ is all about control, all about her destiny being _hers_ , but it's _also_ about the basic need, the simple _desire_ to get the hell out of the damn cold.

Not _everything_ is about metaphor.

That cold is biting at her again, no matter how tight she tugs her coat around her. After a year, you'd think - wrongly, apparently - that she'd be a bit more used to it, more accustomed to the drop, the way the temperature plummets without warning, with no preamble, no slow and steady descent. The cold is just suddenly there, right in her face, sharp frozen blades stinging and slicing. It's a surprise every time, the way it crashes down all around her, before she's got time to prepare.

Story of her life, you might say. _Again._

 _Some_ things _are_ about metaphor.

Alex snaps the collar on her coat and stuffs her hands in her pockets - ignoring the now nearly constant buzz of her phone - and bemoans, not for the first time, her lack of gloves. She had a pair, but she lost them somewhere near the L-Train. It wasn't her usual, not the F that she took to work each day or the R she took back… home… every night, not even the S she rode out to the edges on weekends, the one that - if you stayed on it long enough - rolled right past the dead-line, the tracks to Metropolis, a ride no one took anymore.

She walked that path. It took her out of the dark, though when she saw what lay beyond it, why they called it the _dead_ line…

It was enough to make her wish the light away.

She didn't tell Eliza where she lost the gloves - those were questions she didn't want to answer even if, as always, the lead she was looking into when she lost them ended up as more nothing than something - but she hadn't thought it would matter. The cold, she _thought_ , was breaking. It hit sixty-two just last week and Alex thought she had some time before she needed another pair.

Wrong, again, but at some point, she thinks, she's got to be right about _something_. Doesn't she?

"I could make you some," Eliza offered, after the third straight day of low teens. "If, you know, you don't want something store bought."

She was only trying to help, and Alex _knows_ that - she thinks 'help' might be _this_ Eliza's default setting - just as certainly as she knows that gloves are a staple here, a _necessity_ and if she said 'yes, please' and 'that would be great, thanks', that would be _that_. She'd have gloves and Eliza would have helped and it was no more than that.

It's warm hands, not a commitment.

But those other ones, the ones she lost somewhere off the L - searching for a man named Jon Jones (and yes, the spelling could have been a _clue_ ) who turned out to be… well… _exactly_ that, a _man_ named Jon Jones - those were her favorites, They were comfy and worn and they fit her just right.

You know. Like a glove.

And so, no, she didn't have Eliza make her a new pair and she didn't stop in any of the half a dozen stores between Maggie's bar and the train to grab some, even though her fingers were already frozen through. That lost pair were her favorites, they were _hers,_ and - frozen fingers be damned - Alex wasn't quite ready to replace them just yet, no matter how bad the need.

Maybe the universe doesn't like a metaphor but, it seems, Alex certainly does.

She hustles across the last intersection and up the final two blocks to the E train. She's headed West, into the teeth of the wind and there's a moment when - right after her phone finally stills in her pocket again - when she thinks that, if she were smart, she'd turn back. Not back to the bar and maybe not to _anywhere_ , not really, but there's this feeling, one rushing through her so fast and so deep that she thinks she might just drown in it, that nowhere might be better than where she's going.

She hears Jeremiah in her head - _her_ Jeremiah, her _father_ \- his words echoing, ones he used to say to Kara but never to _her_ , when her sister didn't think she could do it, whenever she thought the burden of being _just_ Kara Danvers was too much and going on like that was just out of the question.

"Sometimes," he'd say to her, "all you have left to do, the only thing you _can_ do, is to just soldier on. Sometimes," he told Kara, "You do what you _have_ to, and hope that gets you a chance for a _want_ to."

He wasn't wrong.

There was a night, a few weeks ago. It was cold, like them all, and she couldn't sleep, tossing and turning in her bed for hours before she finally gave up the ghost, before she stopped even trying. She sat on the window seat in their room, the one that was so close - _so_ close but not _quite_ \- to the one in her apartment back ho... _there_... and stared out the window, watching the stars blinking in and out from behind the night clouds.

"She's from one of those, isn't she? Your sister?"

They'd talked before. They'd talked a lot, like _a lot_. She… _Lexi_ (really?) didn't sleep much, the cold kept her up - it made the lesions burn - and the heated blankets and hot water bottles and homemade soups Eliza piled on and poured in, all of them did little or nothing and, really, even when Lexi said they helped?

Alex knew she was lying. She _always_ knew.

So Lexi talked. It kept her mind warm, she said, kept those few firing neurons bouncing, even as Eliza told her she needed to rest, that she needed to stop pushing herself. "Better to push myself like this," Lexi said, "than pushing myself to the grave sooner than I should."

Alex was never sure if Lexi knew, or if she _saw_ the visible pain on her mother's face, if she saw how Eliza cracked a little bit more at every mention of graves or deaths or ends. Did Lexi see it, did she know?

Did she _care_?

"Can you see it?" she asked that night. "The star she came from?"

Alex shook her head. No. "I'm not even sure it's out there," she said. "And I kinda don't want it to be."

Lexi got that. She _understood._ It was bad enough that there was no Kara, bad enough that here, there never had _been_. There was no Supergirl on this Earth, there was no _Kara_ , and it was odd to Alex, the way she separated the two now. The hero and the sister, like they were different people.

The one she loved. And the one who…

"It bothers you, doesn't it?" Lexi coughed - a low tiger growl of a thing from deep in her chest, the sound of it alone was enough to make Alex ache - and rolled in the bed, elbows boney and askew, three firm, hard pillows propping her up to almost normal head level. "It''s like the worst contradiction. You're hurt, you're mad, you want to hate her cause she didn't save you. But you can't… feel that and miss her at the same time."

Alex didn't need to turn from the stars to know Lexi was looking out to the hall as she spoke, to the _almost_ shut door of the room her parents stayed in.

Almost twins, remember?

"Yeah," she said, nodding. "And it's worse. It would be bad enough just that she never was, that she never existed. But if I could see it, if I could see… her star… to know that it's there, right there, just out of reach…"

Millions of miles of space. Three feet of Exodus glass. So different.

So the _same_.

"Mom said you still haven't decided," Lexi said. She shifted in the bed again, never able to stay in one spot for very long. There wasn't any need for her to be more specific; both of them knew just what she meant.

Alex watched the stars, silently staring into the night and doing her best to avoid the sight of her own reflection in the glass. She hated it now - the sight of herself - hated every time she caught a glimpse in the glass, every morning when she couldn't avoid the mirror or caught that warped, funhouse fragmented _almost_ her in the curve of a spoon, the faded not quite there vision staring back from the screen of her phone.

It wasn't her that she saw. It was _her_.

"It won't be long now," Lexi said. Alex was used to it by now, all the daily, and sometimes _hourly_ proclamations of impending doom. But, somehow, no matter how often Lexi said that it wouldn't be long, it always _was_. There was always another hour, always another day, another week.

Sooner or later though, she'd be right. And that broke Alex's heart.

Who it broke for more - Lexi or herself - she wasn't quite sure. Or, so she kept telling herself.

" _I_ couldn't do it," Lexi said. "I couldn't be someone else, even if that someone else _was_ sorta me." She rolled onto her back, the pressure easing from her chest, a moment or two of bitter relief. "But I guess I didn't really do too good a job of being _me_ , either, did I?"

The 'don't say that' rushed to Alex's lips, but she held it there, bit it back. There's a time, she thought, for coddling, for reassuring, for assuaging the guilt and soothing the spirit. And then there's the end.

And the end ain't no time for bullshit.

She glanced around the room, soaked in - for about the _thousandth_ time - the science fair trophies (a dozen) and the college degrees (three) and the ID badge from the lab, dangling on its hook by the door. All the little bits of Dr. Alexandra Danvers.

And the pictures, the photos, the tiny glossy slivers of 'Lexi' poking through.

The one. _One_.

Her name was Stacey and they met freshman year, roommates sophomore and junior, moved in together off campus as seniors. They got their degrees together, took their first jobs at the same lab, worked the same shifts and came home together every night.

Together. But not _together_.

"I couldn't… _decide_ , either," Lexi said. "I couldn't choose between her and my fear. I lived with it for so long, all my terror of even saying it out loud… it was easier, almost comfortable, almost like the longer I lived the lie, the more true it got to be, you know?"

Yeah, Alex knows.

Lexi let out a long, slow shudder of a sigh, her words coming in more gasps than breaths. She was finally giving in, sleep was winning, for the moment. "I never chose" she said, "and I guess _not_ choosing was, kinda, a choice."

The kinda choice that sent Stacey to Midway City, to a different lab, a different apartment, a different life.

There wasn't a moral to the story, no hard learned lesson for Alex to cling to. Lexi had no words of wisdom born from the nearness of death. _That_ was just the shit of fairy tales, not of life. Sure, if she looked hard enough - with enough imagination and determination to find something, find _anything_ \- Alex could draw the line, she could connect the dots. Lexi never chose and now Lexi is going to die, alone and full of regret.

But that's how Alex is _living_ and so, really, besides a few more breaths drawn and a few more days in the light, such as it is, what's the difference?

Alex doesn't know, she doesn't have a _clue_. But as much as she might wish different, she _does_ know that she's only got two choices. Get on the train, go home, and put an end to the end and hope that the light of _that_ life, the one she _chooses_ , is enough to keep her warm. Or, she keeps on keeping on, living in the dark, spending her days _almost_ out of hope, but maybe that 'almost' would be _enough_ , just to keep her going, to keep her moving.

To keep her soldiering on.

She's always been a good soldier.

Alex pulls her coat as tight as she can and boards the train. Her stop is the last stop - because _of course_ it is - so she's got a few more minutes. Time to think, maybe, time to choose. Tonight was the night for that, right? That was what she said, that was what she _promised_.

She closes her eyes and leans her head against the window, letting the rumbling thrumming of the train course through her. She needs to be _smart_ , to weigh it all out, so she makes the _right_ choice. She needs to think.

But she's just so damn _cold_.


	4. 3:37

In the end, it's not an alien that gets her.

It's not some Kryptonian super criminal with a bit of nasty vengeance on their mind or a virus from somewhere out in the stars. It's not even the way she always thought it would go, some punk kid with his daddy's gone, trying to make a name, trying to earn his stripes in the streets.

Maggie always thought _that_ would be the one, she was _sure_. She'd lived those streets for years before anyone even knew aliens - besides the one with a cape and that poster boy All American smile - were a thing. It made sense to her, after a fashion, that whatever, or _whoever_ , finally did her in, it would happen there. In an alley, on a corner, in a dark abandoned crack house, where one look at it just screamed _the end_.

She thought that was where she'd die.

She was wrong.

About the _where_ and the _death_ , even if, in all honesty and with no exaggeration for effect, this is what she's _sure_ death feels like.

Bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy _and_ political correctness _and_ let's just toss 'no man left behind' right out the airlock, burying it, but no, not in a soldier's grave with its flags and its pomp and circumstance and, you know, _honor_. No, how about instead we do it in some back boardroom, hidden from all the eyes who don't 'need to know' - protect the secrets, right - not out in the light of day, but under cheap lighting and even cheaper words, a shallow and unmarked grave, stuffed full of red tape.

So, yeah, maybe it's not a death, not _really_. At least not hers.

 _From the Office of the President: Until further notice, all away team missions to other Earths are summarily canceled._

Yeah. Not _hers_.

There was an incident - code for a death, _another_ one - and Maggie _gets_ that. She understands the knee jerk, she comprehends the need to do something, _anything_ in the face of tragedy ( _that_ , she understands far too well), and she _knows_ , deep down, that no one is doing this or changing that or making the tough calls without weighing _all_ the factors.

She just knows which of those factors weighs more. To her, at least. And to J'onn. She knows he's not happy with this - not that anyone could really tell the difference between his not happy with _this_ scowl and his not happy with _anything_ one - but she's seen him when no one else is watching, when he thinks he's alone, or when it's _just_ the two of them, after hours, pouring over reports and scans and data they don't understand and hoping that, maybe, their lack of understanding meant that they missed something. A detail. A clue.

An Alex.

When it's just them and not Winn or Kara - _especially_ not Kara - Maggie sees the weight of leadership pressing down on J'onn, the burden of his duty versus his family, of what's best versus what's _right,_ sinking his shoulders and making him seem all too… human.

Sometimes, that's enough. Sometimes, _those_ times are enough for the both of them, just to be there like that, with someone who understands in a way that even Kara and Winn just can't, the struggle every day between orders and _needs_. Sometimes, all the reports, the scans, the data, it all falls away and they just sit there, sharing the silence in the same place where they shared _her_. It's all there. Their mutual memories, the joint pain, their shared…

Loss.

 _That's_ the word, the _right_ one, the _accurate_ one. But, also, the one Maggie refuses to say or to even think because loss is final and loss is over and loss… loss means Alex is _gone_ and she's not coming back and that's _not_ right, that's _not_ accurate because there are still worlds out there.

Orders be fucking _damned_.

* * *

He tries to warn her, he really does.

He has a whole speech and it's a _good_ speech, a very sage and wizened leader kinda speech and, Maggie imagines, it's the kind of speech that most good soldiers would fall in line for, the kind of thing that would inspire men and women - and the occasional genderless alien - to run through a wall for the man.

But she's not a soldier. She's a cop. You can toss a uniform on her and call her Agent and give her a team but, at heart, Maggie's still just a cop.

A cop who hops through interdimensional breaches on the regular, but still…

"This isn't your captain down at the precinct," J'onn says, "you can't go all hardass wildcard with _her_."

Maggie manages - barely - to not roll her eyes and just how quickly he's adopted the 'bad cop movie lingo'. She's a _bad_ ass and, if anything, she's a _maverick_ , not a wild card. But she gets it, she really does.

Even a cop - even one with a heart bordering on broken and a temper as loaded as her gun, with the safety _off_ \- gets it. This isn't the captain or the district attorney or a judge who doesn't understand the difference between the law (as in the one on the books) and _the law_ (the one that keeps good people from ending up very very dead.)

This is the President of the United States.

And yeah, maybe Maggie didn't vote for her - there's no rule that says a woman _has_ to vote for a woman or has to vote _at all_ \- but Kara did and Winn did and Alex…

"She had one of those stickers."

J'onn swivels in his chair, looking back at Maggie in confusion. Well… more confusion than _usual_. She has a habit of speaking her mind - which is fine - but sometimes she forgets that everyone else didn't ( _couldn't_ ) hear what was in her mind _before_ she started speaking it.

Sometimes like now, for instance.

"Alex," she says, as if there's ever another 'she' that she might be talking about. "She had one of those 'I voted today!' stickers. The ones with the tiny flag inside the 'o'." Maggie laughs, and if the sound didn't startle her so much, it might feel good. "She stuck it on her butt and texted me a picture that night. I was on a stakeout and I snorted coffee all over the dash of my car."

J'onn smiles and Maggie wonders, not for the first time, what that might look like if _he_ didn't look like Hank Henshaw. She saw it once - the uncovered truth of him - and just about the only thing she remembers?

Teeth.

She can't imagine them in a grin, can't imagine them pearly and white and looking like anything but 'all the better to eat you with' and she wonders - again, not for the first time - if it's been so many years for J'onn being _Hank_ , if, maybe, he sees himself the same way.

She'll have to ask him.

Someday. Someday when he's _not_ staring at her again with that look that _screams_ 'you gonna fuck this up' _and_ 'I hope you do' all at once. Maggie looks away, unable to meet his eyes, even though she's lost count, over the months, of how many times she's led one after another empty handed team back through a breach, and it's been his eyes she's seen first.

She imagines, having never seen it herself, that in that moment, his eyes? They look a lot like hers. She imagines that _his_ look's _her_ look, the one she gets with every new Earth she touches, in just those few minutes as they hook up the gear and run the scan.

3:37.

"That's how long it takes," she says - and there's that forgetting and speaking again - "Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, _exactly_. From touchdown to scan start."

She figures J'onn knows that, she figures he clocks it every time - just like she does - running point from ops, wishing like hell (or the Martian equivalent, assuming there is one) that he was _there_ , with her.

"Absolutely not." _That_ order had come from above too, the prez laying down the law. "We're in uncharted waters… or worlds… as it is. Sending along a mind-reading Martian disguised as a human?" She'd shaken her head and almost laughed. "Are you _trying_ to start a war?"

Maggie had blown it off, thought it was ridiculous and over thinking and paranoid and just a big old bureacratic bit o'bullshit to keep J'onn under lock and key. And then…

Well. Then this morning happened.

"The first one we checked was Earth 4, remember?" She's not _really_ asking him because she _knows_ he remembers. It's still kinda funny to her, how quickly, how easily she'd accepted that there _was_ a four - or a three or a two or a _one hundred and sixty-three_ \- "and it took us twelve minutes and forty-three seconds. We hit the ground and got the gear up and those minutes, it felt like hours."

It felt like _days_.

And then the scan.

5:25.

 _That_ number she couldn't change. The other one… they _worked_ on that. They'd drilled over and over and _over_ , working out the kinks, cutting down on the redundancies. Trimming the fat, as it were. But that 5:25 was _fixed_ , it was _constant_ , the one sure thing for every trip.

Besides, you know, coming up empty.

"I remember watching the countdown," Maggie says. "It was like walking the treadmill, watching the timer getting lower and lower, waiting on the results." She raps her knuckles gently atop the table, unconsciously counting off seconds. "That was Alex's way," she says. "She never left the the calorie counter up on the screen. Only at the end. She liked the surprise of it all, you know?"

It's funny, Maggie thinks, the things that stick with you about someone after they're… misplaced. She can't remember - and she's _tried_ \- how Alex's breathing sounded at night, in her sleep. But she _does_ remember the treadmill.

Maybe because for the last twelve months, she's never quite gotten off.

Until, you know, _today_.

"By the time we got to Earth 7, we had it down to six-seventeen," she says. "Five-fourteen by Earth 9." She drums out the moments - one two three - on the table. "They didn't have cars there," she says. "And no planes. It was boats. Everywhere was _boats_."

Boats and five-fourteen and then five-twenty-five and then, as always, _nothing_.

Her team kept at it, working and working and even when _they_ weren't working, _Maggie_ was, always searching for another shortcut, another two seconds here, three seconds there, four seconds was a Godsend and when Winn found a way (just don't ask her to _explain_ it) to cut

a half minute from their time, she could have kissed him.

 _Kara_ did.

Mon El didn't approve.

But, by then, he didn't approve of much and, really, Maggie thinks - _now_ \- that maybe they should have seen that as a sign.

But they were _busy_.

They hit 4:05 by Earth 15. 4:00 flat by 16, 3:53 by 19, and 3:44 by 23.

The search was three months in and a well oiled machine and cruising through two Earths a day and Maggie was feeling it. "We'll find her," she said. "It'll be any day now," she _repeated_ to Winn, to J'onn, to Kara, to James (while he was _still_ James), to anyone who _would_ listen, to any and every one she could _make_ listen.

Like her team.

The joys of leadership. Rank, Maggie discovered back in those early days, had its privileges.

It was her mantra. She said it over and over and _over_ again and Maggie knows Dr. Rory would have something to say about it, probably some psychobabble about self-fulfilling prophecies or self-actualization or a whole bunch of other _self_ crap, and she wouldn't be _completely_ wrong.

It was self _._

Self _ish._

Maggie didn't say it for Kara or for J'onn or even for Winn, even as torn up and hurting as he was about Lyra. No, she said it for _herself_. It was to keep her sane, to keep that 3:37 (by 27) and that 5:25 from driving her to drink or to run or to start tearing up _all_ the Earths one after another, until she found _an_ Alex who wasn't _the_ Alex but, if she was that far _gone_ …

Any Alex-port in a storm, right?

Well… no. That was _wrong_.

At least, Maggie _wanted_ it to be _wrong_ and she kept telling herself - and everyone else - how they were going to find her, any day now, any minute, because _that_ kept her from thinking maybe it was more _right_ than she should, kept her from wondering _where_ Alex was and _how_ Alex was and _what_ Alex was _doing_ to survive.

Or who she was doing it _with_.

That treadmill kept Maggie moving. And it kept her working. And, most importantly, it kept her from _thinking_.

And maybe, she thinks, this is just a pause and maybe it's just a hiccup and maybe in a day or a week or a couple of them, they'll be right back in business.

But twenty-four hours or forty-eight hours or one hundred and sixty-eight or three hundred and thirty-six fucking _hours,_ well, that's _a lot_ of 5:25s. It's so many and it's so _much_ and all Maggie's got to fill all that much… is thinking.

Yeah.

Like that can end well.

* * *

Her name was Grace.

Grace Heller. She was new to the DEO, transferred in from the Air Force about a month ago, learned that there were multiple Earths her second day on the job and on her fifth trip to one?

She died.

"Your team," President Marsdin says - and Maggie swears her eyes are aglow, like Christmas bulbs behind her lids, but that's just ridiculous, that's just a trick of the light or some faulty wiring for the vid screen and, really, she'll have to get Winn on that later - "landed on Earth 175… this morning, on a routine search for Agent Danvers, is that correct, Director?"

J'onn nods. That's _all_ it was. A routine check. The kind they've done on almost 174 Earths before, most without so much as a hiccup.

"Upon their arrival, the team immediately encountered armed resistance," Marsdin says. She has notes, but she's not looking at them. She's looking at Maggie. _Through_ Maggie. "Is that also correct, Director?"

Another nod, but shorter, terser, more 'get on with it' than 'yes, Madame President'. She knows Maggie's already been briefed, she knows all three of them know _all_ the details - they might well be the only ones who do - but she's beating that horse anyway. Trying to prove a point, maybe?

Who knows?

Certainly not Maggie.

Politics and all its accompanying bullshit is _far_ above her pay grade.

The President rattles if off like a fucking inquest. Detail by detail, always checking with J'onn, almost like she's hoping he'll tell her she's wrong. Faulty intel. Bad reporting. Fake news.

He never does.

It goes something like this. The team lands on E175, as planned. Their feet hit the ground and then the… well… resistance, enemy, hostiles - call them what you will - hit _them_. It's just scatter shots, at first. Round after round into the ground right in front of the team, just a bit of 'get your attention' fire.

If they'd _wanted_ anyone dead, they'd have been _dead_.

If they'd wanted anyone dead, right _then_.

The team, they were told, was violating some decree or another, some law or treaty or magna fucking carta about breachers. _Your kind_ , they were told, were not allowed, forbidden, persona non grata.

Your kind.

Yeah… like Maggie's never heard _that_ before.

They were to leave, _immediately,_ and they were never to return. All of that was simple enough, your standard issue threats, basic dictatorial shit. Just the sorts of things, Maggie knows, that the diplomats and politicians - the people who lie like most of us breathe - would handle with a bit of negotiation, some quid pro quo, a dash of 'we just need five minutes… well, maybe a few seconds _more_ ' and wham, bam, Bob's your uncle, they'd get their scan.

That's how it should have gone.

Except that, after laying down the law, they - the resistance, the enemy, the _hostiles_ \- they felt like… well...

Maggie's got no fucking _idea_ what they felt like or what they were _thinking_ or much of anything about them other than that they then opened fire - pointed and direct and targeted right at, and _only_ at, the lead agent - and no, _she_ isn't thinking how easily, how _normally_ it could have and would have been her.

She's not thinking about that _at all_.

"The report says Agent Heller died almost instantly," Marsdin says and Maggie waits, she's _sure_ that moment is coming, the one when she says something trite, some Presidential, politician BS all about 'small comforts' or how 'at least there's that', all the things that someone who's never lost anyone might not think _not_ to say the grieving.

She's heard a lot of those the last twelve months. She's heard _all_ of them.

"As if that makes it somehow better," the President says. "Dead is still dead, whether it's five seconds or five minutes."

Oh. Well.

Maybe Maggie should have reconsidered her vote.

"Obviously, this sort of action cannot go…" The President shakes her head. "I wanted to say unpunished, but… this isn't some country or a rogue state or terrorists." Marsdin leans into the screen and Maggie sees, for the first time, how much older she looks in private, when she lets her public mask drop.

One of them, at least.

She has a point, too. This isn't an avowed enemy, an invading army, this isn't even _aliens_. It's Earth. _Another_ Earth. One whose laws they had somehow violated and one which, clearly, has no compunction dealing with… _violators._ And one that knew they were coming, and _that_ , really, is the key. That's why the order, that's why the 'until further notice', that's why she's -

"Shutting you down. It's the only way." The President holds up her hand silencing both of their immediate and obvious protests. "For _now_. Until we know what we're dealing with, until we're certain that we're not sending anyone else into something like 175, we have no choice but to -"

"Leave her."

J'onn says it.

 _J'onn_.

It's not that Maggie wasn't _thinking_ it… hell… it's not that she wasn't going to _say_ it. But it's not her, it's _him_. The good soldier, mister by-the-book (usually), the one person on _their_ side of the table who _consistently_ respects authority.

Maggie does too. _Most_ of the time. When it's not getting in her way, so, OK, maybe _most_ is a slight overstatement, but this _is_ the President. She was going to argue, _obviously_.

But she'd have been respectful.

Probably.

J'onn stands, his hands clenched into fists at his side, but he's still so ramrod straight, still good soldiering on even as he protests. "You're leaving us with no choice but to leave Alex… _Agent_ _Danvers…_ out there, somewhere." He leans forward, breaking his posture, those fists pressing down into the table and, for a second, all Maggie can think of is teeth. "She's alone," he snaps, "alone and lost and you want us to _leave_ her."

"I think 'want' is a bit unfair," Marsdin replies. She's calm and cool, letting him get it out because she knows what Alex means to him. But still, she's only human, Maggie figures, she's not going to let him make _her_ the bad guy. "I don't _want_ this, J'onn. Not any of it."

At least there's something they can all agree on.

"Maybe you don't _want_ to," J'onn says, "but you're _going_ to. You're going to leave her out there, wherever she is. And you're going to _order_ all of us to do the same. Her team and her friends and her _family_."

"I _know_ what I'm asking," Marsdin says. The calm is slowly cracking. Maggie gets the sense she's not used to being questioned and she doesn't really like it.

" _Do you_?"

What was that about not liking it?

"Director…"

But the Director… _J'onn_ … well… he's had enough. Enough of the politics and enough orders and enough months watching a woman her considers one daughter slowly unravel while the other is lost to him and maybe it's taken an entire twelve months, but _now?_

Now, enough is finally _enough_.

"You're asking us to give up, even for a _moment_ , on someone who never gave up on us," J'onn says. "Not when she found out who… _what_ … I really was. Not when saving me meant having to kill the last of Kara's family." He shakes his head and lets out a shuddering breath, knowing he shouldn't, knowing he _can't_ say it. "Damn it, Olivia, she was on that ship for _us_."

But he says it anyway.

Marsdin shrinks back in her seat as Maggie sits up in hers. She's confused and a bit lost - and it's not like either of those are _new_ sensations for her, not in the DEO - but she thinks, she _feels,_ like something happened. Something she's missing.

 _Us_.

Us?

Us, like the DEO, right? Us, like the Earth, right? Us, like the good guys, right?

Right.

Right?

"Alex boarded that ship to stop it," J'onn says. The edge, the anger, they're all gone, almost as if he spilled them out and now his cup's just empty. "Nobody was going to _die_ , all of those lives, they would have gone on, just not _here_." He slumps back down into his chair. "And still, Alex tried to stop it. She risked everything to try and keep those people _home_. _Our_ people."

It takes Maggie a moment - maybe two, maybe three, maybe _all of them_ \- to see it, to reconcile it in her head. This is why she _needs_ Alex around. For that big brain that makes it all look easy, that mind that can see and comprehend and process even the most insane ideas (like a woman who can _fly_ ) and somehow make them… palatable… make them _work_.

Ideas like glowing eyes. Ideas like hiding in plain sight.

Ideas like the President of the United States being an alien.

It's funny, Maggie thinks (again), all the things you never consider, that you never even _think of_ , even when they're right in fucking front of you.

"I understand my orders," J'onn says, rising from his chair again. "And I _will_ carry them out. But this is wrong, Madame President." He glances at Maggie and then once more at the screen as he leaves. " _You're_ wrong."

Maggie doesn't say a thing as she watches him go. It's rare, she knows, for her to be lost for words. But then, it's probably pretty rare to find out the leader of the free world isn't, you know, _of the world._ She's not sure, not even a _little_ , if she's supposed to follow him out, showing her solidarity, or if she should wait or if she should speak or…

Or _what_?

This morning - as fucked up as it was - Maggie knew her world. Meet with the doc, hop on the treadmill, come home empty, go home alone. Wash, rinse, and repeat repeat _repeat_. But now, she feels like one of those cartoon characters, the ones that run off a cliff and don't realize it, their feet still going in the air, just waiting for gravity and their minds to catch up and yank them down.

She gets a feeling this is gonna be a hell of a fall.

It's the President who breaks the silence and not at all in the way Maggie might have thought.

"My people," she says, "we can be anything. The Durlan are shape-shifters. We can be anyone we want." She folds her hands on the desk in front of her and her face, Maggie swears that she sees it waver. "Tell me, Agent Sawyer, can you guess what I was, back home?"

Maggie shakes her head. For once, she can't even hazard a guess.

The President, it turns out, was… well… nothing. She wasn't important, she was no leader, she certainly wasn't a commander of men. "My planet was wracked," she says. "There was a war, a nuclear one. Almost destroyed it all."

Some of her people, they had gifts _besides_ shape-shifting. Not gifts like Kara's or Clark's, not even like Barry Allen's or Oliver Queen's. They just had immunity. A gene quirk that left them invulnerable to the perils of radiation.

"Those with the gift were sent in, dropped into the worst of it, all the places so devastated, they might never recover," she says. "Clean up crews, hunters looking for survivors or anything that could be salvaged to help the rest of us."

 _She_ wasn't one of them. She had no gift. No immunity. On Earth, the power to change, to be anyone or anything… it's remarkable.

On the Durlan homeworld, it was like being born with two eyes or two ears or ten fingers and ten toes.

It came with the package..

"I was sent here," Marsdin says, " _because_ I was nothing. I had no family and, if I was gone, I wouldn't be missed. I was sent alone and with little chance of ever returning." She stares off, eyes fixed on some point behind Maggie. "I spent six months hidden in the woods, coming out

at night, learning how to mimic people, how to shift and not just my face or my body, but _all_ of me." Her eyes drop, falling back to the table. "That was in 1987."

Thirty years.

5:25… it seems somewhat less long.

"I became Olivia Marsdin in 1990 and never changed," she says. "And I've been living a lie, ever since."

Her people, she says, didn't care about her. She didn't have anything they needed, life had no intrinsic value to the Durlan, not like it does to humans. That was the hardest thing to learn, the damn near impossible thing to mimic.

"One life… all the lives… none of it mattered," she says. "Not unless it could do something, not unless it was special. Like Kara. Or Superman."

Or Alex.

Or maybe _that_ one was just special to Maggie.

"I've seen what war… what _real_ war can do, Maggie. I've seen the ways it destroys and breaks and how impossible it is to come back from it." The part of her that _is_ President Marsdin slowly slides back into place. Maggie can see it, now that she knows to look. "I can't allow it to happen here," she says. "And sending teams… we don't know what we're getting into and _we're_ clearly not equipped to handle it."

She's not wrong.

"Agent Sawyer, I want you to listen to me, very carefully." That mask is back, that presidential sheath of power that blinds so easily. The perfect cover. "I cannot authorize _DEO_ teams or the use of _DEO_ resources to investigate foreign and sovereign worlds. The U.S. _government_ just cannot be seen as a potential invader."

Maggie gets it. She wishes she didn't, but she does.

"Further," Marsdin says - because there's _always_ a further - "I cannot take the risk that you might _act alone_ or with the assistance of other _sympathetic partners_ and _continue_ your hunt for Agent Danvers without full DEO support."

Maybe Maggie imagines it, maybe this time it really is a trick of the light, but she swears… she's _sure_ Marsdin's eyes are glowing again.

No… not _glowing._

Flickering. On and off.

"As such, I am _temporarily_ suspending you from _active duty_ and placing you _on leave_."

And there they go again. Off. On. Off. On. Off…

On.

On _leave_.

Wait…

Maggie replays it all, in her head, and… oh… _oh_. It clicks home for her, the realization of it all and, really, it _is_ funny, she thinks _again_ , all the things you never even _think of_.

Even when they're right in front of you.

Marsdin collects her notes, shuffling the papers into a neat pile in front of her and no, it doesn't seem like she's stalling _at all_. "The director's objections will be duly and _officially_ noted," she says. "And I hope, Agent… _Maggie_ … that while you're _gone_ , you're able to find someone who can _help you_ with all of this." She nods once, curtly. "Perhaps, if you do, the time will pass a bit more _quickly_. It might be all done before you know it. Over in a… _flash_."

She stands, the camera slow to adjust and pan up and by the time it does, her eyes are normal again and her mask is in place. She's the _President_ once more and she dismisses Maggie with another nod and the screen fades to black.

Maggie lingers by the door, probably longer than she should. She knows that, by now, the orders for her suspension have come down and that, any second now, there will be armed escorts at the door, waiting to walk her out. It's procedure, after all.

They'll take her ID, her gun, her rank and privilege. All of which she drops on the table.

But not her phone. So, she _could_ wait to make the call. She could get out of the building and be on her way home and all it would take is just a little patience.

Because _that's_ something Maggie has in _spades_...

She leans against the door, waiting for the sound of steps in the hall, as she brushes over the keys, slowly dialing the number she knows by heart. Maggie watches the phone, noticing the way each button flickers to life beneath her fingers.

On. Off. On. Off.

On.

The call is answered - as it almost always is - on the first ring and Maggie can't help smiling at the consistency. "Hey," she says pushing off the door and out into the hall, brushing past the guards as they enter. She'll see herself out. "It's me. I need a favor," she says. "Can you set up a meeting for me? I need to have a chat with your boyfriend."


End file.
